Are You a Micromanager?

Are You Sure?

When you are experiencing stress, it affects your ability to lead, and often results in a desire for greater control. When you are responsible for a team and their productivity, this stress-driven need for control can cause you to inadvertently start micromanaging your team. You may not even realize you’re doing it.

What Makes a Micromanager?  

Here are some signs you might be micromanaging your team

• Do you require your team members to seek your approval before they make decisions - even about inconsequential matters?

• Do you insist on being copied on all important emails?

• Are you always asking for project updates?

• Do you feel anxious that you might not having key information?

These are just some of the more obvious signs that you may be micromanaging your team. And the problem with being a micromanager is you end up with a disengaged team which leads to decreased productivity, higher turnover, and lost revenue.

So, what drives us to micromanage, anyway?

Stress is of course a driving factor, but who we are and how we show up in the world determines our ability to manage stress. In other words, if you want to be a great manager, you need to know your strengths and shortcomings, as well as  your stress-triggers and methods for defusing or avoiding them.

And it all starts with self-awareness.

How to Avoid Micromanaging

Strengthen Your Emotional Intelligence and Lead with Self-Awareness

When we talk about emotional intelligence, we're largely talking about deep self-awareness on an emotional level.

Emotional intelligence refers to our capability to understand, manage, and accurately identify our own emotions as well as the emotions of others. This is the kind of self-awareness that can help you maximize your effectiveness as a team leader.

In fact, mountains of research have made it clear - self-awareness optimizes your ability to lead.

In his book, “Emotional Intelligence”, renowned Psychologist Daniel Goleman (1998) pioneered the idea that “the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others,” was a hallmark of effective leaders.

And in a report published by MIT Sloan Management Review, self-awareness was identified as the most important capability for leaders to possess. The report,“How To Become a Better Leader,” is based on 2,000 in-depth conversations with international executives. One key finding - successful leaders know their natural strengths and find ways to boost or compensate for their weaknesses.

Another study published by Korn/Ferry International found that self-awareness also benefits the bottom line. When reviewing the stock performance of 486 publicly traded companies, they found the companies with strongest financial performance tended to have employees with greatest self-awareness.

As a Strengths-Based Leadership Coach, I’ve seen first-hand how teams operating with self-awareness achieve greater overall success.

If you want to avoid micromanaging - the first step is self-awareness.

Adopt a Strengths-Based Leadership Model

When I work with my clients to understand their innate talents - and the those of their individual team members, I rely on CliftonStrengths Assessment.

This assessment has helped leaders optimize their skills; teams reach their full potential; and companies increase their revenue. All by gaining a deeper understanding of the natural strengths of everyone on the team and aligning those strengths to maximize performance.

When you have a deep understanding of your strengths and your triggers, you can develop strategies for optimizing the good stuff and defusing or avoiding the bad stuff - like stress.

And when you’re not stressed out and trying to control everything, you’re a lot less likely to find yourself micromanaging your team.

Strengths-based leaders --

• Align talents with tasks

• Build diverse teams

• Create a culture of transparency

• Encourage curiosity and empower your team to make decisions

With strengths-based leadership, the whole idea is to uncover the natural talents of your team members, grow them into strengths, and optimize performance for maximum results.

You learn to focus on what’s right and how to turn human potential into human performance. Understanding the strengths of your team will also give you more piece of mind, and when everyone is aligned with their talents, you’ll likely start to feel good about giving up control.

Get a Stress Management Plan

So much of developing a solid stress management plan revolves around making sure your basic biological needs are being met. For example, eating and drinking healthy food at a regularly scheduled time, getting plenty of sleep, and establishing a work-rest schedule that you stick with.

Beyond that, knowing your stress triggers and how to defuse them is important. Some things you might consider trying to defuse mounting tension --

Coherence Breathing

Research has shown that practicing coherence breathing can change your mood. When we experience anger, frustration, and anxiety, our heart rhythm changes in response. It becomes jerky and erratic and is associated depleted energy. And when we experience appreciation, joy, care, and love; our heart rhythm becomes highly ordered and harmonious. These contrasts are easy to see when and individuals heartwave rhythms are electronically recorded and graphed.

Exercise

Physical activity increases the production of your brain’s feel-good chemicals, endorphins. Research has also shown that physical activity may be linked to a lower physiological reactivity toward stress. That means, people who get more exercise are less likely to be stressed out (and more likely to be in good health!)

Meditation

Meditation is highly effective at helping you manage stress. Practicing involves resetting your mind-body connection. There are many different styles and techniques, but they come down to releasing negativity and quieting our monkey mind. It can give you an overall sense of peace and calm while improving your overall wellbeing.

The benefits of regular meditation include:

• Ability to see different perspectives

• Increased self-awareness

• Reduced negative emotions

• Increased creativity

• Increased patience

The Bottom Line is….

If you want to avoid being a micromanager, or change your micromanaging ways - you’ve got some great options! Start with self-awareness. Understand what you’re working with, what your strengths are and how to optimize them. And of course, let us know if we can help.

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We specialize in helping teams and organizations understand and implement practices that cultivate the power of interdependence.

The Wellsiliency™ Institute has developed a series of interdependent courses to comprehensively address the knowledge and skills leaders and teams need to build strengths-based values-driven performance cultures where all experience belonging.

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Our institute has designed five program pillars to help leaders be well and lead well through a skill progression from Whole-self Intelligence™ integration to boost resilience and confidence, strengths-based wellbeing, strengths-based team building, strengths-based leadership, and psychological safety to unleash collaboration.

We don't believe in providing superficial programs; instead, we strive to become your collaborative partner by equipping your leaders with the skills they need to create meaningful, enduring outcomes. Our ultimate goal is to help you build a legacy of leadership excellence that will make a real difference in your organization's success.

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